Energy Matters

6 Reasons To Add “Home Performance” to your HVAC business

The future of HVAC includes home performance, and that is a good thing! In the slide show below, you can review my quick business case for why HVAC contractors should incorporate broader home performance approaches in their business.

I find the slide show more fun, but for those of you who prefer the text version, here are some reasons why home performance makes sense for an HVAC business (and vice-versa for you folks who haven’t added HVAC to your mix yet!)

1. A comprehensive approach allows you to deliver solutions
that are better for your customers and their families.

A well designed and installed HVAC system can do a great job delivering comfort in homes. But it’s a lot easier to deliver comfort to a to a home if you have control of the home—how it retains (or rejects!) heat, air, and moisture. To provide that control, you need to consider the enclosure, not just a box—even an awesome piece of HVAC equipment—and a distribution systems. The right solutions mean happier customers and fewer callbacks.

2. Adding home performance to a residential HVAC service
business is a great way to increase profits!

What if you could increase revenue, increase margins, and get more out of every marketing, sales, and administrative dollar you spend? Increased profits, that’s what. Home performance can help you add thousands of dollars to your average installation ticket, with incremental work that’s is at higher margins.

3. Keep your people happy and busy all year long.

Adding home performance helps reduce HVAC seasonality, which not only increases profitability, but it keeps your most important resource, your employees, working all year long. They stay happy, and they stay with you.

4. It helps you stand out from Bubba and the Box Swappers.1

Differentiation! Competing on price alone, Bubba and the Box Swappers can’t deliver real quality or real solutions to their customers. By bringing more tools to the problem, you’re able to deliver the appropriate solution to your customers (see #1, above). And you can tell the truth about what their home needs and not worry about missing an opportunity. Homeowners are wow-ed by the expertise you bring, and the guarantees you can provide.

5. Without home performance, you’ll lose business.

If you’re not adding home performance to your HVAC business, it’s likely that competitors, whether your traditional HVAC competition or new Home Performance upstarts, are taking business from you right now.

And if they’re not doing it today, they will be doing it soon. Leading HVAC companies are already figuring this out and gobbling market share. Would you like a piece of the pie—or do you want to starve?

6. An HVAC service company is ideally positioned to
take on home performance.

Quality HVAC companies have technical expertise, huge customer bases that can be offered an expanded array of services, and the ideal marketing force in its service technicians. You don’t need an HVAC foundation to tackle home performance. However, starting from an HVAC base gives you advantages that those coming from the other trades don’t have. If you’re willing to embrace this.

Now, there are lots of ways to crack this nut. You can partner with auditors and other trades. The HVAC companies that are crushing this, though, bring it all in-house to compel quality, retain a critical customer focus, and make sure that the long-term relationship stays within the company not with someone else.

Yes, there’s a learning curve. But the rewards are worth the investment.

Mike Rogers is the President of OmStout Consulting. A nationally recognized expert in residential energy-efficiency, he works with contractors and programs to scale sustainable market approaches to improving homes. More on Google+

Mike,
Good points on helping to shift our industry from single installs to whole house upgrades. The other thing shifting to HP does is to help improve HVAC contractors’ ability to deliver performance guarantee contracts.

We still need good and creative financing to support these larger contracts such as PACE and on-bill so the owner does not have to assume the entire financial burden when they may only reap several years of the energy and comfort benefits before moving.

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TESTIMONIALS

Great training, thanks! Spending two days with you were simply transforming.–Scott Bigness

For the last few years I have been searching for better ways to present and sell energy efficiency to homeowners. Mike provided me with strategies and tips that I knew were out there but I have had trouble putting them into focus. I am already seeing results from his recommendations–Charlie Rogers, Habitat Home Energy Audits

Mike gave my team and I great sales training and motivation to make to make some critical changes in our sales structure. His training is essential for every sales member in any company at any size. I have already seen an improvement in our sales closing rate in just a few weeks.–David Hamburger, Building Efficiency

Mike was Great! Attentive to his audience, and very informative. Very real world, no hype.

Mike Rogers is one of my home performance heroes. He thinks big, takes big steps and gets big results, but more importantly he takes the time to show the rest of us the way forward. He's been a trusted friend, supporter and ally not only for Home Energy, but for home performance and the HVAC industry–Tom White, Home Energy Magazine

Not only do you have, and offer, very valuable street-wise business management insights, but you also have an excellent way of delivering your messages and tips in language/ways that contractors can easily understand.–Ken Farrish

Talk about 'street wise' in the area of Home Energy Retrofits. Mike understands this market sector and what it takes to get homeowners to invest in improving the energy efficiency of their homes.–Mike Lubliner, Washington State University Energy Program